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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#131

Post by jraph »

upofadown wrote: post #115
jraph wrote: post #45

Some people sending plain text mails also wrap them manually. If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. And a non manually wrapped plain text is not wrapped at all in some cases. By all means, send me plain text mails, it will be lighter for my self-hosted inbox, but don't wrap them manually. If you are going to abuse /this/ kind of `formatting`, however, you are ma…

>If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. If your screen is so small that it can't display 80 characters across then pretty much anything you look at it with is going to look odd. Any HTML formatting such as tables will also be painful to read.

I like big characters. I can be far from my screen to read, use a low brightness and never have tired eyes.

I just checked on my phone some random opened web page: with my settings (which are far from the default - I raise the DPI setting and the font size so I have small UI elements but big texts), it displays 45 characters per line on portrait mode. Actually the font size is a bit too high, but I don't really care as far as most web pages are readable. I'm fine with scrolling the occasional big HTML table, and will change the settings if this becomes annoying.

So, yes, sometimes, my screen displays less than 80 characters and is perfectly usable. And this fact is not really of my correspondent's business, whether they choose to manually wrap at 80 characters, 72 characters, 42 characters or some other arbitrary number of characters. Actually, nobody knows that apart from people who read this comment. I display text as I see fit (and this is totally an intended pun).

Re: Use plaintext email

#132

Post by munmaek »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

I don't want your formatted html, nor does my client render it. You can attach screenshots or link to them.

> There's no good reason to

There's no good reason for using anything other than plaintext in email. You can use slack, riot, or other chatrooms for the rest.

Re: Use plaintext email

#133

Post by josho »

bachmeier wrote: post #128
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

Re: Use plaintext email

#134

Post by wyldfire »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication.

It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.

Re: Use plaintext email

#135

Post by masukomi »

I just want to put it out there, that regardless of if this is a "fight worth fighting" or not. Email was a nightmare for me. I could not keep up. Coworkers would catch themselves and laugh when they asked if I'd gotten an email.

Switching to neomutt has changed everything for me. I now mmaintain Inbox Zero.

I write in markdown. I convert it into a multipart email with HTML in one keystroke for everyone else.

Other benefits:

I don't know this for a fact, but i suspect that HTML email has got to _suck_ for visually impaired people using screen readers.

plaintext email means no tracking by marketers, or facebook, or anyone else.

plaintext emails are also _way_ shorter. There is so much less crap to mentally deal with when all the marketing BS has been stripped away.

plaintext emails give you a glimpse into just how much you're tracked too. Nevermind the privacy aspects of seeing the real url, you see that the "real" url is multiple lines long because of all the tracking they've embedded in it. It makes you think twice before clicking it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#136

Post by zepolen »

josho wrote: post #133
bachmeier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

  images loading..2%
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   ____________________________________
  |                                    |
  |                                O O |
  |                                 O  |
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  |             MY LOGO                |
  |          My catchphrase            |
  |                                    |
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  |------------------------------------|
  |                                    |
  |  Hi josho!                         |
  |                                    |
  |  This is why it's slower to read!  |
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  |____________________________________|

Re: Use plaintext email

#137

Post by glenneroo »

munmaek wrote: post #132
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

I don't want your formatted html, nor does my client render it. You can attach screenshots or link to them. > There's no good reason to There's no good reason for using anything other than plaintext in email. You can use slack, riot, or other chatrooms for the rest.

Our offices don't use any of that chatroom crud and I'm extremely thankful for the lack of extra imposed distractions, not to mention the horror stories of being reachable 24/7 because of Slack/Riot/etc.

Why require another medium for communication when email works just fine? What is the point in joining a chatroom to talk to one person only to be spammed by everyone else in the room? For those cases where email is insufficient, walking over and talking or making a phone/video call are IMHO better.

Re: Use plaintext email

#138

Post by masukomi »

josho wrote: post #133
bachmeier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

it's 99% psychological but I also 100% agree. Just posted a top level comment about how it has absolutely changed my life with regards to email. If you're having trouble keeping up with email and aren't afraid of the command line i _highly_ recommend using a cli client. Neomutt is a bitch to set up because there aren't any good action oriented docs, but it's been worth every bit of effort. There are other clients that are much easier to set up (like alpine) but neomutt has so much power and for me being able to write in markdown and convert to HTML for normal folks was a requirement.

the 1% that isn't psychological is how much faster _everything_ is when dealing with a plaintext client (neomutt in my case). "Power Users" use the keyboard to navigate gmail. Normal (neo)mutt users use those _all_ the time and they're faster because there's so much less for the computer to do with each keystroke.

Re: Use plaintext email

#139

Post by jraph »

chapium wrote: post #98
jraph wrote: post #45

Some people sending plain text mails also wrap them manually. If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. And a non manually wrapped plain text is not wrapped at all in some cases. By all means, send me plain text mails, it will be lighter for my self-hosted inbox, but don't wrap them manually. If you are going to abuse /this/ kind of `formatting`, however, you are ma…

hard wrap at 72 characters seems pretty conservative

This will wrap badly on many phones in portrait mode. The only hard wrapping that will probably not break anyone's workflow for sure is 1.

Re: Use plaintext email

#140

Post by jeffalyanak »

josho wrote: post #133
bachmeier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

A well formatted html email has the potential to be much more readable than any plaintext one. The issues come in execution.

I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting.

On top of that, a sizable percentage who send html email fail to take accessibility into account and leave out important elements like alt tags.

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